Speaking of PST files

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

Marc left a comment that had me nodding my head in agreement.

“The problem I have is with some managers who save EVERYTHING on their personal .pst file and end up with +1 GB file size”

While I haven’t had anyone break the 1GB plateau, I know exactly what he’s talking about. Most of the PC’s we bought a couple of years ago are configured thusly:

C drive = OS and installed apps on a 2GB partition, leaving about 500MB of free space. Nothing should ever be stored here, so 500MB should have been plenty.

D drive = Empty 8GB partition. Used for storage of docs that don’t need to be put on the network or backed up, installation of some extra apps that are not part of the normal setup. (I.e. scanner software, media players, etc.)

Network drives: The place where users should store all their data file, documents, etc. because only network drives get backed up.

In retrospect my mistake was leaving Outlook’s PST file in the default location on the C drive. Yes, you guessed it, even with almost 500MB of free space on the C drive, and nothing needing that space, some people still managed to run out of C drive space, mostly because they not only saved every attachment they’ve ever received to the network drive, but kept it in Outlook as well! I hadn’t anticipated that. It was a rookie mistake, I admit! One that I wouldn’t duplicate. Now I simply leave the hard drive unpartitioned, even when the OEM install CD trys to create partitions. None of my users has ever gotten the hang of using the D drive anyway, it was just wasted capacity!

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